Field notes: Room 47, Tulsa

Room 47 meets on Thursdays in a converted garage with a window unit that loses to July. They are eleven weeks into Job, which is to say they are tired and the text is not.

This week the room's oldest reader — eighty-one, widowed twice — read the whirlwind speech aloud and then nobody said anything for four minutes. The host timed it. Four minutes.

“We used to discuss Job,” she told me afterward. “Now we just sit where he sat.”